


Reflect What You Are

by novelogical (writingmonsters)



Category: The Alienist (TV)
Genre: Drawing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Prompt Fill, Self-Esteem Issues, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-19 04:47:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19968268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writingmonsters/pseuds/novelogical
Summary: “I wouldn’t change a thing about you, Laszlo.” John says it like a promise, like it is a certainty, his eyes golden and earnest in the soft light of morning. He sits forward, rests his elbows on his knees as though he might bow his head in prayer, fixes Laszlo in his sights and lets him read the conviction in John’s own face. “Not on a page. Not in life.”





	Reflect What You Are

**Author's Note:**

> cross-posted on tumblr as a prompt fill for morguevampire.   
> title is from The Velvet Underground's "I'll Be Your Mirror".

“Don’t.”

It is the first word Laszlo has uttered in an hour and John almost isn’t certain that he’s spoken at all – his jasper eyes never waver in their back-and-forth passage across the pages of his book – but for the sudden, unhappy slant of the alienist’s mouth.

John lays aside his pencils and charcoal, recrosses his legs with the sketchbook balanced on his knee. It is something he has taken to, more and more often now; little scribbles on paper scraps, rough sketches wanting to capture something of his own happiness, of the small ephemeral moments in which the world seems perfect. “Don’t what?”

“If you insist on drawing me,” Laszlo refuses to look at him, his brows drawn and tense above his spectacles. “Do not do so as if I am one of your society debutantes. You should not be kind.”

A half-finished sketch. The outlines roughed in with pencil – it is early still and the distilled sunshine plays across the bed covers, highlights the fall of a stray curl across Laszlo’s brow, the shine of his polished lenses. He’d woken to the sight, Laszlo propped up against the headboard of the big four-poster, absorbed in his reading with the dressing gown slipping down around his bare shoulders. Relaxed, dare John think it – _soft_. The fingers of his good hand stirring occasionally to turn the pages.

John has seen Laszlo Kreizler in every light, knows every facet of the man; moments of tranquility – of ease – are a rare commodity. Something worth preserving. Laszlo indulges him in his sketching, the two of them each going about their own work, even as he refuses to ever look upon the final products.

“And why should I not be?” John challenges.

Laszlo abandons his book, turns the open pages face down on the bedclothes. “Kindness does not lend itself to honesty,” he pronounces. There is a snap of brittle frost around the edges of the words. “To be kind requires small lies – pretending at altruism.”

He has turned the thought over and over in his mind on more than one occasion, worried over it like a great question of philosophy, and still he cannot determine what might be worse. To see John’s portraits and find the truth reflected there? Or to see a lie. A delusion drawn out of kindness – out of misplaced love.

“When you make your sketches you highlight certain features, yes? Make the eyes more beautiful to offset a crooked nose. Arrange the hair to cover an unfortunate birthmark.” Laszlo plucks the spectacles from his nose, folding them neatly. “Or you obfuscate – erase the disagreeable portions from your sketch, make flaws vanish entirely.”

 _A congenital defect._ Such an easy thing. A matter of perspective – a three-quarter turn to the right and at John’s hand, a portrait of Laszlo Kreizler might play at being whole. Laszlo has obscured the truth himself, more often than not – in the curve of his shoulders, the cut of his shirts, wielding arrogance and intellect to blur the most vulnerable parts of himself.

“I wouldn’t change a thing about you, Laszlo.” John says it like a promise, like it is a certainty, his eyes golden and earnest in the soft light of morning. He sits forward, rests his elbows on his knees as though he might bow his head in prayer, fixes Laszlo in his sights and lets him read the conviction in John’s own face. “Not on a page. Not in life.”

“A blatant lie,” Laszlo tuts, even as he tries to clamp down on the quiver of anxiety that tightens his insides. _Fool_ , he thinks, and he is not certain whether he means John or himself. “There are many things I imagine you would change about me if you could.”

“Oh?” 

The chair by the fireplace is abandoned, the embossed leather sketchbook left balanced on its arm. John settles himself on the edge of the bed, finds Laszlo’s bare ankle beneath the sheets with one warm hand. The heavy weight of his eyes never wavers and – pinned in his scrutiny – Laszlo wants to crawl inside himself, wishes John would look somewhere, anywhere but at him. 

“What would I change?” John traces the bony knob of Laszlo’s _malleolus_ , his fingers still smudged with charcoal and lead. “Do tell.”

Impossible to speak, with the breath seizing in his throat. Laszlo swallows the swill of fear and shame. “I am a difficult man” he says, trying and failing for levity. “Too stubborn, too academic, too cold. I am…” He flexes the fingers of his right hand, the nerves tingling their displeasure, John follows the small movement. “It is not hard to find flaw with me.”

“And yet” John hums as his hand migrates to Laszlo’s knee, plucking the novel from the bed to set it aside. “Flaws and all, I still find myself _deeply_ in love with you.”

This close, Laszlo is near cross-eyed trying to search John’s face for lies, for some small tell to show him that none of it is true – a joke at his expense, a lie meant to placate him. “You do not think that love is blinding? Another way the truth can be obscured?”

“I think,” John says slowly, tracing a thumb along the line of Laszlo’s beard. “Under the right circumstances –” the ghost of a kiss pressed warm between his brows “– love adds a certain amount of clarity.” His fingers against Laszlo’s lower lip taste of carbon and India rubber and, when their lips meet, Laszlo feels the sigh of his words more than he hears them. “I see you. I know you, vexing and ridiculous as you are, and I love every part of you.”

Someday Laszlo will work up the courage to face his simulacrum hidden within John’s sketchbook. When he does, paging through the thick leaflets of drawing paper with numb fingers, he will not know quite what to make of the faces – the moments – he finds there. A clever mouth and thoughtful eyes, and it is _Laszlo_. There is a tenderness to each stroke of the pencil, but there is honesty too; written in the roll of a bare shoulder, traced with affection along his mismatched arms and through the sweep of over-long, curling hair.

John draws him beloved – renders him precious – and, another someday, Laszlo may just accept it for truth.


End file.
